On literary hydrology

“Imagine a river, wide and majestic, which flows for miles and miles between strong embankments, where the land is firm. At a certain point, the river, out of weariness, because its flow has taken up too much time and too much space, because it is approaching the sea, which annihilates all rivers in itself, no longer knows what it is, loses its identity. It becomes its own delta. A major branch may remain, but many break off from it in every direction, and some flow together again, into one another, and you can’t tell what begets what, and sometimes you can’t tell what is still river and what is already sea…” — Umberto Eco

(Yes, it’s cheesy as hell to quote Umberto Eco, but I don’t really care – because check out this one: “How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths…” How beautiful, indeed).